Clearing the Record

This article on police officers who extort sex gave an incorrect neighborhood for a police stop at Torresdale Avenue and Levick Street, which is in the Tacony section of the city.

Philadelphia Police Officer James Fallon spent many midnight shifts on patrol - not for crime, but for sex.

His partner, Timothy Carre, says he tried to warn their bosses, but nobody paid attention - not until the night Fallon and Carre stopped a stripper getting off her shift, forced her into their patrol car and, she says, took turns raping her in the darkness near I-95.

The officers are now off the force, convicted of sex crimes, but the city is still confronting the consequences of that 2002 attack.

Investigators found a string of other women who say they were victimized by the pair, and a lawsuit filed by the dancer recently brought to light dozens of other accusations of sexual misconduct involving Philadelphia police from 1992 to 2002. The department dismissed most as groundless, or unprovable.

In another, still-open case obtained by The Inquirer, the department allowed an investigation into a complaint of a forced sexual display in a police lockup to languish for years. No one has been disciplined.

Philadelphia isn't unusual. Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex, an Inquirer review shows.

Many of those cases fit a chilling pattern: Once abusers cross the line, they attack again and again before they are caught. Often, departments miss warning signs about the behavior.

Most police departments do little to identify the offenders, and even less to stop them. Unlike other types of police misconduct, the abuse of police power to coerce sex is little addressed in training, and rarely tracked by police disciplinary systems.

This official neglect makes it easier for predators to escape punishment and find new victims.

Lawyers for Philadelphia's 7,000-member department say in court papers that sexual-misconduct complaints are "extremely rare" and that commanders move swiftly to discipline offenders.

Though the number of abusive officers in any one department is usually small, the damage they leave behind is often devastating - to their victims, to taxpayers and to the reputations of their colleagues.

The Inquirer found nearly 400 reports of police sexual misconduct across the country in the last five years, including dozens in the Philadelphia region:

In Baltimore last month, a detective was suspended after a 16-year-old girl picked up for prostitution said he assaulted her at a police station. Three other Baltimore officers allegedly raped a woman in a station house in December, and are facing criminal charges.

A Glenolden, Delaware County, officer was convicted of raping a woman in 2002 after he answered a domestic-dispute call. "He had his police uniform on, his gun, his nightstick," the woman said. "I did exactly what he asked me to do."

In small-town Edgewater Park, Burlington County, a police officer bought a Burger King meal for a female prisoner in 2002 - then forced her to have sex in a police van. He went to jail.

A San Bernadino, Calif., officer preyed on prostitutes and drug addicts, attacking them in dark lots or abandoned buildings. By 2003, the city had paid a total of $300,000 to 18 victims. "I was scared beyond speech," said one woman who was raped by the officer while handcuffed.

The abusive officers who are caught and charged are likely only a fraction of the real number, policing experts say.

Many victims, ashamed and intimidated, never report the crimes, The Inquirer review shows. As in the case of Fallon and Carre, victims often don't surface until the offenders are caught and taken off the street.